Wordmanship: What is historical fiction?

11:40 AM,
Apr. 17, 2013

Written by

Terry Mapes
wordmanship.blogspot.com

"It is a funny thing that our idea of an historical novel is always something at or before the Jacobite times, simply because that was Scott's idea of one. We forget that a longer interval separates us from Napoleon than separated Scott from Prince Charlie."- Arthur Conan Doyle in a letter to fellow writer James Payn, April 11, 1895

How exactly should one define the term historical novel? At the time he wrote that letter, Doyle was in the midst of writing a series of stories set during the Napoleonic Wars. Apparently some of his contemporaries thought of Napoleon as too recent to be considered ...